“You stole money from Kingsly,” I say. “Probably around four hundred thousand dollars,” I say. “Maybe more, maybe less.”

“No I didn’t.”

“Yes. You did.”

“What are you on about? If he had money, why’d you think I’d take it? And how’d you even know what he had unless . . .” His expression changes, as if he’s figuring it out, but it changes too much, as if it’s an act. Something here isn’t quite right but I don’t know what.

“You killed him,” he says, and something in the way he says it makes me think he already knew that. Not just thought it, or suspected it, but actually knew it, like he was there.

“The money,” I say. “Take me to it.”

“I don’t have any money.”

“The people that money belongs to have my daughter. They’re going to kill her unless I get it back for them.”

“Like I said, I don’t have any money.”

Listen to him—he’s lying. If he was truly sorry he’d tell you where that money is. He’d act more sympathetic. He’d tell you that if he could help, he would.

“I think it’s time you left,” Bracken says.

“They’re going to kill her.”

“And I’m sorry about that, I truly am.”

He truly isn’t.

“Somebody else must have taken it,” he carries on. “Somebody either before or after, I don’t know, all I know is I don’t have it.”

He’s lying.

“You’re lying.”

“It’s the truth.”

He’s lying.

“Okay, then,” I say. “Any ideas who?”

“What?”

“You were his probation officer. Who else did he work with?”

“I don’t know. I’d have to check.”

“The police didn’t ask you this already?”

“I don’t know. Yeah, I guess so.”

“And?”

“And what? I gave them a bunch of names they already knew and it was a waste of time.”

“Okay. Okay. Who else is here?”

“What?”

“In this house. Who else is here?”

“I don’t know. Just some woman.”

“Show me.”

He leads me to a bedroom where a woman with large breasts and very big hair is finishing off getting dressed.

“I promise you this is the last goddamn time, you son of a bitch,” she says, straightening up her skirt which is torn up the side. When Bracken doesn’t answer, she looks up and sees first me and then the shotgun, and the anger washes out of her face, just like that, in about half a second, and gets replaced with a big amount of fear. Her eyes are puffy and mascara has run down her face, making her look like a Goth.

“What the . . . ,” she says, but she runs out of words.

“Shut up,” Bracken says to her, and then I make him do exactly that by banging him on the head with the gun as hard as I hit Schroder. He goes down about as hard and looks like he’ll be staying down for about as long.

“Please, don’t hurt me,” the woman begs. “I didn’t even want to be here.”

She’s wearing a really short skirt and high-heel shoes and must keep her yearly calorie intake at under a thousand. “You wanna earn some cash?” I ask.

She doesn’t even think about it. “Does it involve hurting him?” she asks, and nods down at Bracken.

“That a problem for you?”

“You can save your cash, sugar,” she says, the fear gone now. “This I’ll do for free.”

“Then we better get started,” I say.

chapter forty-three

Torture is all about balance, and more often than not, proves to be an extremely ineffective way of getting information. It comes down to pain thresholds: inflict too much pain and the victim will end up saying anything to make it stop. Problem with that is it makes the information unreliable. Don’t inflict enough pain and they’ll continue to resist. Inflict way too much and the body shuts down. I think it comes down more to fear than pain. I have under thirty minutes to create as much fear in Bracken as I can before it’s too late.

I don’t know why I suddenly seem to know so much about torture. It’s as if a section of my mind has been unlocked, a hidden vault of knowledge opening its contents up to me. The monster has something to do with it. I think to myself, this entire ordeal could be more Disney-oriented if I gave the monster a name—Mickey. Mickey is telling me how to torture a man. Mickey is begging me to kill him. But Mickey isn’t in control here—not yet anyway.

Bracken is starting to come to, and he’s noticing that his entire world has changed in the last few minutes. He’s resuming transmission and finding himself naked and tied to a chair. He’s shaking and he’s cold and scared. On the dining table there are two tools: a steak tenderizer from his kitchen drawer that looks like a wooden mallet, and a very large chef’s knife. The knife has a stained handle and is worn, the blade is chipped near the end but still very sharp.

I feel nothing.

Good. You’re coming along nicely.

Detective Inspector Schroder hasn’t resumed transmission yet, so maybe he took a harder knock—or it’s an accumulative thing for him, having been drowned an hour ago. When he wakes up he’ll find he’s been dragged inside and propped up against the living-room wall with a clear view of the show, his hands cuffed behind him and his feet bound in front of him. There’s a gag in his mouth because, truth is, I’m sick of hearing him talk.

The woman, who may or may not be a prostitute but who probably is, is also in the living room. Bracken blinks a few times, bringing his new world into focus. He sees the steak tenderizer and the knife and his imagination is conjuring up his future.

“Where’s the money?”

His first impulse is anger. “Go to hell,” he says, and I jam a dish towel in his mouth and swing the tenderizer as hard as I can into his knee. Something in there gives, and he lurches forward with so much force the chair jumps off the ground and nearly tips over. His leg can’t kick forward because it’s bound to the chair. His face turns red and then almost purple as tears stream from his eyes. He bites down so hard the dish towel is the only thing stopping his teeth from snapping off against each other. I give him two minutes to thrash around uselessly on the chair until he gets himself back under control.

The woman says nothing, just keeps on watching, all quiet now, maybe not so sure now about helping me out.

I pull the gag out.

“I’ve never figured out why they start with this kind of bullshit in the movies,” I say. “All this torture foreplay. I’ve always thought I could do better. Thing is, I’ve always been a simple man with simple pleasures. That’s all. I had the most beautiful woman in the world as my wife, we have an amazing daughter together . . . and the things that made my dad who he was never touched me. But in those movies where guys like me torture guys like you, they never cross the line. They break bones and cut skin, and the guys they’re torturing always seem to stand up to it. I figure there are two ways to make a man talk. You either go through his eyes or you go through his dick.” I pick up the knife. “I’m gonna start with the latter, so you can still watch.”

“Wait,” he says.

“Too late,” I say.

I move the knife to his groin. His red face suddenly goes pale. “My bedroom. In the closet,” he says, the knife above his dick. “Under the manhole in the floor in the wardrobe. The money is in there. Take it. It’s yours.”

I put the gag back into his mouth before handing the knife and tenderizer to the woman, who looks at them as if they contain the Ebola virus. Then she takes them. She hefts them in her hands and gets a feel for the weight. “What am I supposed to do with these?”

“If he moves, then do what makes you happy.”

“No problem,” she says.

I head into Bracken’s bedroom and open the wardrobe door. There aren’t many clothes hanging in there, and most of what is there are all dark pieces, a size too big for me. I push them to one side, the hangers grating across the iron bar. There are shoes on the floor and a couple of cardboard boxes. I kick them out, exposing the floor. I get down on my knees. The stitches pull at the wound in my leg; I feel a couple of them pull through. I drag back the piece of carpet. There’s a manhole cover with a hole drilled into it for me to hook my finger through. It leaves a gap one man could fit through, but not two.